Page 87 of A Lab Rat's Guide to Fated Love
Vir
Vir ran to Nori’s side andgathered her limp form into his arms.
“Nori! Please…” he begged, swiping hair away from her cold, damp brow. Her features, rosy only a moment ago, were drained of all color. “Please, wake up.”
She stirred, mumbling something incoherent.
“Are you okay? Please, look at me—”
She squinted up at him, and her eyes widened as they latched onto his face.
“GEROFFME!”
“Nori, it’s me—”
“NO!” she shrieked, thrashing madly in his arms.
As his grip on her eased, Nori launched herself away from him, gasping for air. Her panicked gaze darted around the room as if looking for an escape.
“Wait!” Vir cautioned. Too late.
His arm flung out to catch her, just as her shin connected with the edge of a chair. But she dodged him, smacking his arm away, and went sprawling to the floor again.
He swore.
“Are—are you hurt?” he asked, balling his hands into fists to keep them from reaching out to her again. He knelt at a distance, trying to gauge if she had any injuries from the fall. “Nori, are you hurt? Please—are you—”Please be okay.
Nori sat up, and her terrified brown eyes lifted to meet his. The look in them sent chills down his spine.
As Vir opened his mouth to ask her again, she flinched and started crawling away from him till her back hit the wall. She pulled her knees to her chest and sat there, drawing deep, shaky breaths.
“Oh Vir,” she whispered after a while, when her gaze finally lifted and found him again. Whatever she saw on his face made her look away.
For every bit of her panic that subsided, fresh guilt took its place. It was heavy, thick. So was the shame rising alongside it. But it was the last bit, the hopelessness lurking beneath everything else, that bothered Vir the most.
“Nori, I’m—” he choked as the rest of the words got stuck in his throat. But they were all useless, anyway. Whatwordscould he possibly offer that would fix what he’d done?
Please be okay.
While he scrambled for something to say, anything to convince her to let him look at her, to see if she was okay, Nori’s emotions surged. They spiraled out of her, wild and dark and potent. And before Vir realized what was happening, they wrapped around him like barbed wire, squeezing, puncturing, and bleeding him dry.
The dense soot of shame and guilt—thicker than his own—threatened to choke him and swallow him whole. His heart stuttered, while his lungs struggled to decipher between lack of air and too much of it.
He crouched on all fours, his vision blurry. He had to separate Nori’s emotions from his or he was going to drown. Now was not the time to fall apart. Not whenshewas sinking right in front of him.
He forced air into his lungs and out. And again. Closing his eyes, he reached inwards to picture himself inside a steadily deflating balloon of energy—his energy. Only his own. Its walls kept shrinking in towards his body, pushing anything that wasn’t his out.
It took him a few attempts to get the barbs to loosen their grip on him. And to stay out. Little by little, his heart rate lowered and his breathing calmed.
When he opened his eyes again, he could still feel everything Nori felt, but not as his own. Instead, he now saw everything as an observer. The pain still lashed at him—it was Nori’s, after all—but it had lost its bite. It no longer incapacitated him.
He wore the detachment like a lifejacket, soaked but no longer drowning, as he watched Nori shakily get up and pad away to the bathroom.
He sat back on his heels and swiped a hand across his face.
Was she going to hate him now? He wouldn’t blame her if she did. He should’ve been more careful. He should’ve done a better job at reading her. There must’ve been hints he’d missed. He could’ve caught those and stopped. He should’ve just stopped, anyway…
But no, he’d fucked up instead. Truly, massively, fucked up.
